Aim & Mission

Home/Field is a space for ethnographers of North America to contend with pressing issues through an anthropological lens, and to explore what anthropology as a discipline — methodology, theory, ethics, and more — can contribute to the imagination and enactment of a more just world.  Home/Field is a project of the Society for the Anthropology of North America.  We aim to publish short-form, dialogical, and multi-sensory work that exists in parallel to the long-form scholarly work found in the Journal for the Anthropology of North America to complement the research articles found in the journal.

Our Name

Because many (although not all) ethnographers of North America are also from there in one sense or another, we also think about the politics and ethics of North American anthropological engagement through the idea of doing ethnography ‘at home.’  However, in our name and elsewhere, we emphatically do not suggest that 1. Anthropology’s proper home is any version of US American intellectual genealogy, geographic space, or neo-imperialist reach; or 2. That only people ‘from’ North America can or should do ethnography here.  Indeed, not only do we welcome and encourage North American ethnographic engagement from diversely-situated scholars, but we also recognize and seek to foreground disciplinary contributions from the margins; from the global south; from Indigenous sovereign nations; from locations of US empire; and from historically excluded scholars.  We imagine Home/Field as, in part, a space where we think about our obligations of care and experiment with accountability towards the people we learn with and from, as well as the broader spaces and places we call home.